@peter_mcmahan@mas.to it really makes it so much more challenging to make a good suggestion if ZFS is a requirement/preference (which, to be clear, I'm a big proponent of!). It's a bit of a sad state of affairs in the whole Linux distro world that there isn't really a single well regarded option that comes with root-on-zfs support out of the box — and that doesn't come with snaps and other things being force-fed into you.

The only non-Ubuntu option I can think of that offers root-on-ZFS out of the box is CachyOS (or indeed Arch), but I'd honestly not ever want the recommend either if you're looking for an "it just works" type setup. If only there was a Debian spin that was just straight-up pure Debian, but with ZFS support out of the box.

I've personally switched to Debian earlier this year, coming from Fedora Silverblue, as it felt the closest to what I wanted from my OS (boring & stable), just sadly lacking root-on-ZFS.

If you're using a desktop and/or laptop with multiple SSDs, not having root-on-ZFS might not be the end of the world, as you can install the dkms module and, for example, use a secondary (+tertiary for redundancy) SSD to store your /home partition?

But yeah, it's a bit of a sad state of affairs. ZFS is a hard one to lose out on once you're used to it's many benefits.

If only FreeBSD was further ahead in terms of hardware compatibility...